2025 year in review

January 19, 2026January 19, 2026 Gretchen McCulloch

In 2025, Lauren Gawne and I reached our 100th episode of Lingthusiasm, our podcast that’s enthusiastic about linguistics! It’s a special format featuring 100 fun things about linguistics, which makes it a great entry point to the show if you haven’t tried it yet or are looking for something to forward to people. We also celebrated our 100th bonus episode (does that make this year actually our 200th episode all told? shhh) by re-releasing our very first bonus episode (on swearing) with added sweary commentary for free to everyone who follows us on Patreon.

I kept studying ASL, including two more semesters of ASL 104 and 105 at the Lethbridge Layton Mackay Rehabilitation Centre in Montreal and a week at the ASL Adult Immersion Summer Camp at Bob Rumball Camp of the Deaf in Ontario. I really feel like I can actually just have a conversation now with someone who’s willing to accommodate me, especially after camp; I’m not constantly running into gaps in basic vocab like I was last year. Sadly, I’m not sure if I’m going to be able to take more classes in 2026, since classes at my level aren’t currently being offered, but hopefully I’ll at least make it out to social things since I know some people now!

Behind the scenes, 2025 was also a year of dealing with some medical stuff, and I’m looking forward to having more energy and hopefully also fewer appointments this coming year. Modern meds are so great.

Conferences and presentations

The Linguistic Society of America’s annual January meeting, this year in Philadelphia, in what unfortunately looks like it will be my last visit to the US for a while.
The LingComm25 conference in April, where I presented a lightning talk on collaborations between academics and non-academics and learned that November 26th is celebrated as National Linguistics Day in the UK — inspiring a Lingthusiasm World Linguistics Day bonus episode later in the year!
The Canadian Linguistic Association in June in Montreal, where I had nice chats with people! Not the same folks, but there was also a Canadian Word of the Year announced by the editors of the Canadian English Dictionary: maplewashing, the deceptive practice of making things look more Canadian than they actually are.
Scintillation, a small literary science fiction con in June, where I participated in panels on worldbuilding and stakes in fantasy.
Lingstitute 2025, the LSA summer institute, where I presented about 101 ways to communicate linguistics with a broader audience (slides) and did virtual office hours
A conversation with Amal El-Mohtar — coauthor of This Is How You Lose the Time War, a book I greatly enjoyed — about her new book, The River Has Roots at the Argo Bookshop in Montreal, a great indie bookstore where I’ve done events before.

PS: if you know of upcoming linguistics conferences coming to Montreal, you should let me know! I try to keep an eye out but I’m not on every listserv, and it’s easier than travelling for me to drop by or even do a lingcomm workshop or lingcomm office hours when it’s local.

Collaborations

The Spanish-language translation of Because Internet was released internationally (available from Piodepagina or Casadellibro, or as an ebook). For lots of juicy details about the translation process, see our Lingthusiasm bonus episode where Lauren Gawne and I interview Miguel Sánchez Ibáñez, the translator. You can also get Because Internet in Chinese, Japanese, or Korean translations, and just for the record, if anyone wanted to bring me to those places to talk about translation or any other subject, I would not say no.

I appeared on a few podcasts:

I appeared on BBC Science Focus Instant Genius Podcast: How the internet shaped how we speak
I was interviewed on Language on the Move about Because Internet and how my own interest in internet language grew
I appeared on the podcast A Language I Love Is, talking about Montreal French and bilingualism in Canada
Because Internet made an appearance in an episode of Words Unraveled

I also started editing a new series of interviews on the lingcomm.org blog with Leah Velleman about community collaboration linguistics projects that don’t have much of a web presence. Here are our four episodes so far:

Bonne Maman puts out a yearly advent calendar of tiny specialty jams, and I liveblogged my way through it with favourite linguistically-relevant books from my shelves that made for thematically appropriate pairings. Apparently it was big news in the jam calendar chat.

Milestones

I celebrated my 13th blogiversary! I started All Things Linguistic in the spring of 2012, and while it isn’t my most active lingcomm project at the moment, it’s still important to me as my very first public-facing one.
It was the 10th anniversary of LingWiki, another lingcomm project which I started in 2015 and which many linguists have picked up since, where we host Wikipedia editathons to improve linguistics-related articles on Wikipedia. I didn’t feel like writing an anniversary post so Lauren did — and not just a quick celebration, but a whole informal history of LingWiki.
The first Crash Course Linguistics video has hit a million views! If you want some fun 10 min linguistics videos to watch or to share, here’s a great place to start.
The lingcomm mailing list now has over 100 members! If you’re someone who makes material or does events communicating linguistics with broader audiences and you want to hear about lingcomm conferences, events, grants, journal special issues, and so on, please feel free to subscribe!
World Linguistics Day was celebrated in 70 cities, 34 countries, and 5 continents.

Lingthusiasm

My linguistics podcast with Lauren Gawne celebrated our 100th episode! To celebrate the nice round number, we made the 100th episode a special feature of 100 fun facts about linguistics, featuring some from earlier episodes and previous guests on the show, as well as some we haven’t mentioned yet (but which we might expand upon in the next 100 episodes).

For the 101th episode, looking forward to the future, we compiled a list of 101 places to get enthusiastic about linguistics, whittled down from hundreds of listener suggestions of podcasts, books, videos, blogs, and other places online and offline.

We also celebrated our 100th bonus episode a few months later! In celebration of this feat we re-released our very first bonus episode (about swearing), now with some bonus sweary facts that we’ve learned in the interim and unlocked for anyone who follows us at any level on Patreon, including free!

Plus, we made a special jazzed-up version of the Lingthusiasm logo to put on stickers, tshirts, and more, featuring fun little drawings from the past 9 years of enthusiasm about linguistics by our artist Lucy Maddox — originally sent out as a sticker to Ling-thusiast patrons and above and now also available on assorted merch — and some linguistics-themed holiday greeting cards, mostly because I personally wanted to send out cards that say {Merry, marry, Mary} Holidays: Whether you say them the same or differently, hope you have a joyful festive season!

Lingthusiasm episodes

Bonus episodes

We’ve also released some bonus episodes as collections if you’d like to check a few out without signing up for a monthly subscription. You can get updated and deleted scenes, interviews, word nerdery, linguistic advice, linguistic gossip, Lingthusiasm after dark, or Lingthusiasm book club.

Reading and other media

Gesture, A Slim Guide by Lauren Gawne
The River Has Roots by Amal El-Mohtar
Hellspark by Janet Kagan
Talking Hands by Margalit Fox
The Sapling Cage by Margaret Killjoy
What We Are Seeking by Cameron Reed (coming in 2026, but I already love it)
True Color by Kory Stamper (likewise in the future, also very excited about it)
And so far in the future that even I haven’t read it yet, keep an eye out for How to Nonbinary a Language by Kirby Conrod
Goblins Oedipus, Dangerous Liaisons, and Sense and Sensibility, which I saw at the Stratford Festival in Stratford, Ontario

Selected posts from tumblr, instagram, and bluesky

New favorite linguistic examples

“She put the card back into her small, for a handbag, handbag” (Center embedding)
“unless☝️you eat a lemon” (Emoji are really gestures!)
“Croissan ‘wich you a happy new year” (Double portmanteau with bonus pun)
The key to creamy cream-free soup is hiding your pantry. (Structural ambiguity)
“KPop demon hunters. KSoda demon hunters. KCoke demon hunters” (A famous case of regional variation)
“OPEN HOLE DO NOT REMOVE” (Zero anaphora)

Never-before-heard sentences

Newly coined words

Acoustic bike (rather than electric)
The Strunk cost fallacy (treating the time wasted on learning silly rules as a sunk cost)
Fauxmage (vegan cheese)
Fort-yearly (every 14 years?)
Woodsqueer (one who squees in the woods)
Hich (where : here :: which : ?)
Somewhen (where : somewhere :: when : ?)
Yaybe (when you’re not sure if the yay is going to happen)
Thembo (a third-person dual pronoun)
Konbarning (a multilingual multicultural good morning and/or good night)

Words that have already caught on

Multilingualism

I am a creature of the night (or at least, that’s the best translation I can manage)
Canada gets a fully bilingual TV show
We had a great discussion thread on dreaming in a language you’re learning.
This is a really interesting article about a horrifying distortion of sign language happening in the UK, and which its creators are now trying to export to other countries and their sign languages

Linguistics-themed everything

Has anyone studied?

Signed languages and synesthesia? Finally, a few years later, Yes!
How our voices change when we talk to a robot? Yes!
How people abuse the surname field in their phone contacts as metadata? I haven’t found anyone yet (please tell me if that’s you!), but it sure seems to be common.
How to spell California’s new pronunciation of “pony”? Well, probably use lexical sets instead.

Inspiring life advice from linguists

Don’t fear the repetition, embrace it!
Acknowledge uncertainty.
Playing with language and rhythm is fun, it’ll be fine!
We do not all think alike, walk alike, dress alike, write alike, or dine alike; why should we not use our liberty in speech also?
Get out for a walk or whatever during daylight hours especially in the dark half of the year.
And share your work even if you’re scared it’s bad — in the words of the late great Bill Labov, “If you give me shit, at least I know you’re capable of shit.”

Missed out on previous years? Here are the summary posts from 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023, and 2024. If you’d like to get a much shorter quarterly highlights newsletter via email, with all sorts of interesting internet linguistics news, you can sign up for that at gretchenmcc.substack.com. If you’d like to get a monthly email when there’s a new Lingthusiasm episode out, plus bonus links for further reading, you can follow Lingthusiasm for free or paid on Patreon.

October, November, & December 2025: Plays, poems, and preserves

January 17, 2026January 17, 2026 Gretchen McCulloch

This fall was a good season for literature. I took a trip to the Stratford Festival in Ontario to see live productions of Goblins Oedipus, Dangerous Liaisons, and Sense and Sensibility.

I enjoyed reading Margalit Fox’s Talking Hands, Margaret Killjoy’s The Sapling Cage, Janet Kagan’s Hellspark, and Kory Stamper’s new book True Color that I’ll soon be able to talk to the rest of you about.

And I… okay, this one takes some explanation, but Bonne Maman puts out a yearly advent calendar of tiny specialty jams (aka jamvent), and I liveblogged my way through it with favourite linguistically-relevant books from my shelves that made for thematically appropriate pairings. Apparently it was big news in the jam calendar chat.

At any rate, if you missed it at the time or would just like to browse a list of linguistics books that I like (admittedly biased towards books that I happen to own in hardcopy), you can read the thread on bluesky, the highlight on my instagram, or the blog post version on my blog.

And then, because why waste a good idea and because it was Lingthusiasm producer Claire’s fault that I got into the jamvent calendar thing in the first place, we also paired each flavour of tiny jam with a relevant Lingthusiasm episode from the archive. You can browse that on bluesky or instagram.

By the way, the last time I did a linguistics advent shenanigan was in 2014, when I liveblogged my way through all 26 episodes of the linguistically witty BBC radio comedy Cabin Pressure in time for the final episode coming out, which you can still read on my blog should you so desire. It’s a great show! I still relisten to an episode or two every time I’m on an airplane.

I also spent a lot of my time working on a project I’m not allowed to talk about publicly yet (dunh dunh dunn). Many thanks to the patrons of Lingthusiasm: their support of the podcast also keeps the lights on while I do a lot of research that will eventually be fun linguistics for all to enjoy! If you want to help me in the research phase and be the first to find out when I have updates that I can share, you can become a member on Patreon.

Events and media

Arroba lengua, the Spanish translation of Because Internet, is now out as an ebook.

The LingComm IRL blog series interviewed Marisa Cook and Daniel Currie Hall on teaching linguistics at a high school STE(A)M summer program in Halifax, with thoughts on getting involved with this same program at universities elsewhere in Canada.

I wrote a double dactyl about Timothée Chalamet and someone, for possibly the second time ever, wrote me my own double dactyl in reply.

A copy of Arroba Lengua, with the text "ya en formato e-book"

"Arroba lengua es el libro perfecto para entender el modo en que internet está cambiando nuestra lengua, por qué es bueno que eso suceda y hasta qué punto nuestras interacciones digitales hablan de nosotros."

Lingthusiasm

Lingthusiasm turned 9 this season! That’s nine years of podcasting enthusiastically about linguistics! Our episodes were:

Over 120 people wished each other a Happy World Linguistics Day from 70 cities in 34 countries! See more stats from World Linguistics Day. Plus: some high-quality Voynich Manuscript page scans for fans of the incredibly popular Voynich Manuscript bonus episode.

We also released some linguistics-themed holiday greeting cards, mostly because I personally wanted to send out cards that say {Merry, marry, Mary} Holidays: whether you say them the same or differently, hope you have a joyful festive season! And then I figured that perhaps I should let other people do so too. Shout out to the person who immediately purchased 50 of them: Redbubble doesn’t show us what your name is, but we hope that all 50 of your nearest and dearest appreciate you as much as we do.

A greeting card says "{Merry, marry, Mary} Holidays. Whether you say them the same or differently, hope you have a joyful festive season!"

New favorite linguistic data

Linguists are NOT KIDDING…

…when we say that this section is full of sentences you can understand that have never before been uttered.

The end of the year means Word Of The Year season! The Canadian one took place in 2025 (I was betting on “elbows up,” but “maplewashing” won). The US one isn’t until 2026, but I had my eye on “lobster’s too buttery.”

And nobody I know of has studied these, but maybe someone should:

Miscellaneous posts

And if you’re still looking for a new year’s resolution, have you considered trying to bring back overmorrrow, a highly useful word that English used to have and which many languages still do?

The featured image is the first of my many books paired with jams!

A copy of Julie Sedivy's book Linguaphile in front of an advent calendar.

July, August, & September 2025: ASL Camp and Arroba Lengua

December 8, 2025 Gretchen McCulloch

This summer, I went to ASL camp! I spent a week at Bob Rumball Camp of the Deaf, in Parry Sound, Ontario, at their ASL Adult Immersion Summer Camp, voices off for 6 nights and 7 days! This was my first time doing any sort of language immersion camp in my various experiences learning languages, and I definitely see why people like them, I really felt liked I levelled up significantly in my signing with that much concentrated practice (and I slept very soundly in the dorm beds since my brain felt so full from learning). And I made friends and got to learn from a left-handed ASL teacher for the first time, which was helpful for me as a lefty!

Also, the Spanish-language translation of Because Internet was released. You can get Arroba Lengua — not a literal translation of the title, but Spanish Internet slangification with a similar vibe — from Piodepagina, Casadellibro, and other places Spanish-language books are sold (note that the ebook edition may be more readily available if you’re outside Europe). And for lots of juicy details about the translation process, see our Lingthusiasm bonus episode where Lauren Gawne and I interview Miguel Sánchez Ibáñez, the translator.

More media milestones

Let’s start with the big news: The first Crash Course Linguistics video has hit a million views! If you want some fun 10 min linguistics videos to watch, here’s a great place to start.

In way smaller news, Because Internet is on one of Penguin Random House’s “credibility bookshelf” zoom backgrounds.

And somewhere in between: Because Internet made an appearance in an episode of Words Unraveled. @efrex.bsky.social made a nice callout to my interview on Let’s Learn Everything. And Linguistic Discovery would like to remind you that the internet is encouraging, not ruining, writing.

Lingthusiasm

We launched two new Lingthusiasm merch designs:

We’ve made a special jazzed-up version of the Lingthusiasm logo to put on stickers, tshirts, and more, featuring fun little drawings from the past 8.5 years of enthusiasm about linguistics by our artist Lucy Maddox. There’s a leaping Gavagai rabbit, bouba and kiki shapes, and more…see how many items you can recognize!
And with various and sundry gift-giving holidays on the horizon, we’ve also got a Merry/marry/Mary Holidays greeting card and sticker.

{Merry, marry, Mary} Holidays

Whether you say them the same or differently, hope you have a joyful festive season!

Lingthusiam put out six episodes, including three interviews.

Is a hotdog a sandwich? The problem with definitions (this was a highly popular bonus episode from a few years ago that we’ve now released with expansions for the main free podcast feed, go see what the fuss was about!)
Why sci-fi gestures live long and prosper: Crossover with Imaginary Worlds (bonus)
Urban Multilingualism
Reading linguistic landscapes on street signs (bonus)
Highs and lows of tone in Babanki: Interview with Pius Akumbu
¡Pos ya está! Translating Because Internet into Spanish with Miguel Sánchez Ibáñez (bonus)

Speaking of interviews, we have more than twenty interview episodes now, and you can find them all together on our topics page, where they have their own category. We also have over 100 bonus episodes for patrons, with a few interviews there as well.

Lingcomm

It was a big few months for communicating about lingcomm. Maybe we can call that lingcommcomm? Or maybe not…

I presented at Lingstitute 2025, the LSA summer institute, about 101 ways to communicate linguistics with a broader audience — some of which we brainstormed together in this bluesky thread.

I started a new series of interviews on the lingcomm.org blog about community collaboration linguistics projects that don’t have much of a web presence. First interview: Lingcomm IRL with Girl Scouts, an interview with Nikole Patson.

The lingcomm mailing list now has over 100 members! If you’re a lingcomm practitioner who wants to hear about lingcomm conferences, events, journal special issues, and so on, please feel free to subscribe!

Lingthusiasm cohost creator Lauren Gawne put out her yearly list of linguistics and language podcasts. Know of a good one she missed? Please let her know!

New favorite linguistic data

“brb making “hich” happen” (analogical creation)
And speaking of which, when will somewhy happen? Somewhen (analogical creation)
“I just want to be a cheese wizard, or fromage.” (portmanteau)
“yaybe — It’s when you’re not sure if the yay is gonna happen” (portmanteau)
“KPop demon hunters. KSoda demon hunters. KCoke demon hunters” (a famous case of regional variation)
“My 9 year old and his classmates have started using “that’s AI” to mean “I don’t believe you.” Me: we’re having dinosaur meat for dinner. Kiddo: that’s AI.” (semantic change)
“OPEN HOLE DO NOT REMOVE” (zero anaphora)
konbarning (Ok, this one’s a doozy… inclusive language, a multilingual portmanteau, then some clipping, and finally a rebus with emoji)

Miscellaneous posts

This quarter’s image is a schwa and a kiki and a nondetatched rabbit part and a vowel space and a microphone and…

April, May, & June 2025: Lauren writes a gesture book!

September 8, 2025September 8, 2025 Gretchen McCulloch

Back in 2017, when I was deep in the writing process for Because Internet, I was feeling stuck on the emoji chapter and Lauren Gawne, my cohost on the then-baby Lingthusiasm podcast (we were less than a year old!) offered to read the current draft. I’ll never forget her comment that led to me rewriting the whole chapter: “You realize this is all related to gesture, right?”

Immediately, I wanted to dive into the gesture literature, which hadn’t been a part of either of my linguistics degrees. I asked Lauren where I should start. Was there some sort of short book or long survey article that put the rest of the literature into context so I could figure out which papers I needed to read more deeply and how they fit into relationship with each other? Lauren was like, “Read these parts of McNeill 1992, and then McNeill 2005, and then these three chapters of Kendon 2004…” — which was when I realised maybe I was going to have to solve this problem for myself. She ended up sending me her classroom slides and answering my questions herself, which led to a much-revised chapter in Because Internet and an academic paper together on emoji as gesture.

Since then, we’ve done several Lingthusiasm episodes about various aspects of gesture, but that gap we noticed in 2017 has still been there: if someone wants a more in-depth entry point into the gesture literature, one that doesn’t assume they have any background in gesture specifically but does assume they want more details than we can fit into a podcast episode, where do they go? Especially since many people’s degrees, like mine, still don’t contain much about gesture, so a prof in linguistics, cognitive science, anthropology, and related fields might not know where to advise a student with a gesture-related project to start reading.

That’s why Lauren has written a book! It’s called Gesture: A Slim Guide and it’s available now from Oxford University Press. The Slim Guides are part of an Oxford series in the genre known as academic crossover books: they’re much less technical than a typical academic monograph, but more in-depth than a trade book from a commercial publisher like Penguin. Here are some ways you can learn more about it:

Lauren’s post about it on her blog Superlinguo
Lauren’s and my Lingthusiasm episode about it
Lauren’s guest episodes on the podcasts Let’s Learn Everything, Because Language, Language on the Move, and Grammar Girl

Events and media

I also did other things this quarter than just take credit for Lauren’s hard work! Quite a few things, in fact: three conferences…

The LingComm25 conference, where I presented a lightning talk on collaborations between academics and non-academics and learned that November 26th will be National Linguistics Day in the UK. Stay tuned for some National Linguistics Day celebration on the podcast!
The Canadian Linguistic Association, where I learned about this “living dictionary” tool for documenting endangered languages and the Canadian Language Museum.
Scintillation, a science fiction con, where I participated in panels on worldbuilding and stakes in fantasy.

…two guest appearances…

I presented with Amal El-Mohtar — coauthor of This Is How You Lose the Time War, a book I greatly enjoyed — in a conversation about her new book, The River Has Roots at the Argo Bookshop in Montreal, a great place where I’ve done events before.
I appeared on the podcast A Language I Love Is, talking about Montreal French and bilingualism in Canada.

…and a few anniversaries:

I celebrated my 13th blogiversary! I started All Things Linguistic in the spring of 2012, and while it isn’t my most active lingcomm project at the moment, it’s still important to me as my very first public-facing one.
It was the 10th anniversary of LingWiki, another lingcomm project which I started in 2015 and which many linguists have picked up since, where we host Wikipedia editathons to improve linguistics-related articles on Wikipedia. I didn’t feel like writing an anniversary post so Lauren did — and not just a quick celebration, but a whole informal history of LingWiki.

Lingthusiasm

We had a few special lingnouncements this quarter. (Is that a word? It is now.)

You can now gift a Lingthusiasm membership to someone else. Depending on the tier you buy, this could get them access to bonus episodes and our Discord server, or even a spot with their favorite IPA character on the Lingthusiasm Supporter Wall of Fame.

We also celebrated our 100th bonus episode on Patreon. In celebration, we went back into the vault and revisited our very first bonus episode — with updated sweary commentary on Important Swearing Developments that have happened since 2017. We’ve made this extra bonus bonus version available to all patrons, free and paid, so feel free to send it to your friends!

Plus, we had a full quarter of three regular and three bonus episodes:

Posts

A while ago I asked, “does anyone on Linguist Twitter know of research on the intersection of signed languages and synesthesia?” Nobody knew then, but now we do: Elizabeth Droubi wrote an honors thesis at Gallaudet University about it.
We had a great discussion thread on dreaming in a language you’re learning.
“this is a version of monopoly where you’re trying to recreate proto-indo-european and I don’t know how to feel about it“
Another great Bill Labov story that a lot of students need to hear
The perennial problem of writers worrying about how kids talk: this time, brainrot!
“How are we feeling about the consensus-seeking ‘we’? 🐦🐦“
Sharps and flats as kiki and bouba
Birdsong as kiki and bouba
‘Just realized that the hole emoji 🕳️ could be used to stand for “portal”…’

New favorite linguistic data

Fort-yearly (Analogical creation)
Woodsqueer: one who squees in the woods (Word segmentation is hard)
This article says younger Californians say pony differently than older ones. But what’s the pronunciation and how should we write it? POH-nee? pau-nee? poh-nay? per-nih? Sounds like we’re all looking for ways to convey GOAT fronting. (Writing about English vowels is hard too, but lexical sets make it easier…)

This quarter’s image is me, holding onto Lauren’s Gesture book with my own two hands (well, one hand had to hold the camera), since it exists in the real world! I hope it brings joy to students, researchers, and autodidacts!

"Gesture: A slim guide" by Lauren Gawne, published by Oxford University Press

January, February, and March 2025: 100th Lingthusiasm episode

September 3, 2025September 3, 2025 Gretchen McCulloch

A bag of popcorn labeled in French and English. Where the English says "No cheese cheesiness," the French says "Au fauxmage"

In the first few months of 2025, we celebrated a podcast milestone: 100 episodes of Lingthusiasm, a podcast that’s enthusiastic about linguistics!

To celebrate, my cohost Lauren Gawne and I did a special double-feature: our 100th episode had 100 “fun fact” reasons to be enthusiastic about linguistics (including a few from former guests) and our 101st episode finally tackles that classic “Linguistics 101” format of the micro-to-macro perspective on language.

Plus, we made a special roundup post of 101 places to get enthusiastic about linguistics. This is your one-stop-shop if you want suggestions for other podcasts, books, videos, blogs, and other places online and offline to feed your interest in linguistics, based on whittling down over 1000 listener suggestions from the Lingthusiasm listener survey with editing assistance from Leah Velleman. Even with a hundred and one options, we’re sure there’s still a few that we’ve missed, so also feel free to tag us @lingthusiasm on social media about your favourites!

Also, and we feel extremely enthusiastic about this, after a bonus episode mentioned crocheting a model of the vocal tract, very talented listener Melody sent us a genuine crocheted model of the vocal tract!

And as always we put out three regular and three bonus episodes.

Publishing news from all over

Because Internet is now translated into four languages — three that I don’t speak (which is very surreal) and one that I sorta do. My author copies of all four have now finally arrived, so here’s a photo of them all hanging out together!

Book covers in four languages: Spanish, Chinese, Japanese, and Korean.

And the famous Bunny Paper — a.k.a. Labov 1971, on evaluating kids’ language skills (using empathy and bunnies) — is back in print in open access form! When Labov passed away, someone mentioned the existence of this once-obscure paper, and Linguistics Twitter went on a hunt for a copy. We eventually did an episode about it on Lingthusiasm. Now it’s back in print so anyone who wants can read it.

Events

I went to the Linguistic Society of America’s annual meeting, this year in Philadelphia, where I played Spot the Canadian, felt a little bit old when I met a longtime fan, and saw “rawdog” elected Word of the Year.

To rawdog: taking on life without the usual protection, preparation, or comfort. Whether it’s diving into a challenge unprepared or skipping the safety net, rawdogging is about embracing risk, stone-cold sobriety, and rolling with it.

I also appeared on a few other podcasts:

BBC Science Focus Instant Genius Podcast: How the internet shaped how we speak
Language on the Move: Because Internet, An interview with Gretchen McCulloch
A Language I Love Is…: Montreal French and Gretchen McCulloch

New favorite data…

“She put the card back into her small, for a handbag, handbag” (Center embedding)
“In a sentence never before uttered by humans, I am delighted to share that an alligator stole my conservation instructor’s hat by jauntily walking into the water while wearing it 🐊” (Novel sentence)
“unless☝️you eat a lemon” (Emoji are really gestures!)
“Croissan ‘wich you a happy new year” (Double portmanteau with bonus pun)

…and a few excellently coined new words

“Acoustic bike” (rather than electric)
“The Strunk cost fallacy” (treating the time wasted on learning silly rules as a sunk cost)
“Fauxmage” (vegan cheese)

Social media

I am a creature of the night (or at least, that’s the best translation I can manage)
Linguistics-themed Valentine’s day poetry
“…our new 3rd person dual pronoun, thembo”
“Bluesky sells books”
Canada gets a fully bilingual TV show
“Just got served this ad for an app called ‘Kiki'” — “Brb launching a competing app called Bouba”

This quarter’s image is a bag of popcorn proving that people in Montreal really are using “fauxmage.”

2024 Year in Review

August 28, 2025 leahvelleman

In 2024, I traveled to Europe to speak at several events, including the launch of the Spanish translation of Because Internet. I started studying American Sign Language through the Lethbridge Layton Mackay Rehabilitation Centre in Montreal — my first time in a language classroom since university and it’s been really fun! The 2024 lingcomm grants were awarded. And I collaborated with the Crash Course Linguistics team on a research article about the series.

This year the podcast and I got some fun tidbits of pop culture recognition. Lingthusiasm was featured in the New York Times’ list of 5 Podcasts for Word Nerds, and Puzzmo’s daily crossword referenced my book Because Internet.

And speaking of which, Lauren Gawne and I kept making the podcast, along with some new merch featuring rabbits and fun personality quiz. I also started working with Leah Velleman on these update posts and assorted other Lingthusiasm and behind-the-scenes projects.

Conferences

Most of my conference attendance this year was in a big trip through Europe, where I attended:

WorldCon in Glasgow, where I was on a panel about linguistic worldbuilding
Societas Linguistica Europea in Helsinki, where I particularly enjoyed a special session on linguistics outreach
A colloquium talk on Applying Linguistic Methods to Linguistic Communication at the University of Tartu and a two-part workshop on lingcomm for participants of Methodological Excellence in Data-Driven Approaches to Linguistics (MEDAL) in Tartu, Estonia (and the excellent linguistics and Finno-Ugric displays at the Estonian National Museum, also in Tartu)
Dropping by Mundolingua, a linguistics museum in Paris I’ve been hearing about for years!
An event with translator Miguel Sánchez Ibáñez and journalist Elena Álvarez Mellado for the launch of the Spanish translation of Because Internet by Pie de Página in Madrid, Spain, which is now available at Pie de Pagina, Casa del Libro, and elsewhere

I also went to the centennial Linguistic Society of America annual meeting in New York City.

Writing

A Spanish translation of Because Internet was released, bringing the translations list to four, with Chinese (simplified), Japanese, and Korean. If anyone reads it in several versions and wants to tell me about the linguistic choices the translators made (especially as I don’t speak the latter three languages), feel free to nerd out with me about it on bluesky.

In 2020-21, I was a co-writer and script consultant for a project to make 16 videos for Crash Course Linguistics, the first video of which now has over a million views! The team behind these videos has also written an academic article about our process in making them, which appeared this year (yup, that’s how academic publishing goes). It’s called Creating Inclusive Linguistics Communication: Crash Course Linguistics and appears as a chapter in Inclusion in Linguistics (full text), an open-access academic book edited by Anne H. Charity Hudley, Christine Mallinson, and Mary Bucholtz. The other articles in this book and its companion Decolonizing Linguistics are also well worth checking out if you’re on the more academic side of things.

Interviews

I appeared on an episode of quiz podcast Go Fact Yourself alongside David Wilcox.
I was interviewed on the Language on the Move podcast by Brynn Quick about social ties, weird old postcards, and more tidbits from Because Internet.
The podcast Dashboard Diaries interviewed me about the linguistics of Tumblr, and I collected some extra links of interest on the subject.
I answered linguistics questions from Ella Hubber, Tom Lum, and Caroline Roper on an episode of their very fun pop science podcast Let’s Learn Everything.

Lingthusiasm

Lingthusiasm, my podcast with Lauren Gawne, celebrated our seventh anniversary! There were some fun podcast events this year above and beyond the usual episodes. Bethany Gardiner made vowel space plots for me and my cohost Lauren, and you can see more about them and how they were made on github. We created a Highly Scientific™ ‘Which Lingthusiasm episode are you?’ quiz. We put out some new merch, including gavagai shirts, scarves, and stickers to go with our episode on a famous thought experiment about a rabbit. And while we can’t take credit for this one, you can get people gift memberships now, in case there’s a linguistics fan in your life who would like to listen to the bonus episodes.

Lingthusiasm episodes

Bonus episodes

Reading, listening, and other media

Babel-17
A Hoard of Infinite Meanings
“A Terrible Irony”: How the Media Lost Trust
I put the glamor back into grammar, a “deadpan German linguistics bop”
The Saint of Bright Doors by Vajra Chandrasekera
A Sweet Sting of Salt by Rose Sutherland
This browser game about making a cup of tea

Selected social media posts

General linguistics

Linguists don’t really know what a “word” is and we don’t really mind
Etymological epiphanies from all over: nookie, cookie, bacon, parasol, parachute…
At WorldCon I learned about the historical dictionary of science fiction and fannish words in the OED
Approaching old language change “with gleeful delight rather than a fussbudgety sniff”
“Woo it’s been a while since I’ve seen such an obvious Google Translate fail”
“New favorite example of the Stroop test“
“If I’ve said this once, I’ve said this a million times…”
Boomer ellipses in hand drawn cartoons
“My language classes in school gave me a SEVERELY INFLATED idea of how much of my future would involve discoteques”
French as it’s taught versus French as it’s spoken
A word for “wet with air”

Fun moments

Oh hey, my tweet is in this xkcd.com What If video
Lots of informal polls!
Tumblr gave us boops. We made boopguistics. Are they a pure instantiation of phatic expression? A great way to annoy your mutuals? Boops boops Boops boops boops boops Boops boops?

New favorite linguistic examples

“Why this poop-propelled ‘headless chicken monster’ is the ninja of the deep sea” (novel sentence)
“A Medieval French Skeleton Is Rewriting the History of Syphilis” (novel sentence)
“Fucktangular” (portmanteau word)
“Mama, my soup is a little too temperature for me” (overextension) and a whole thread of other child language gems
“Smallrus” (portmanteau, complete with an n=1 comprehension study)
“That’s not nice,” cried one, as Juniper slurped down a duckling like a raw oyster. (novel utterance)
“Catholic Priest AI chatbot is defrocked within a week after taking confession and okaying Gatorade baptisms” (novel utterance)
“Reblog to fangle this post” (backformation)
“I don’t get people’s interest in the horse-drawn carriage that has gotta be one of the worst possible animals to be drawing a carriage like how in the heck is a half ton animal with hooves and such terrible limb dexterity going to ever finish an entire drawing of such a mechanically complex thing I—” (structural ambiguity)
“Jesus Christ, the fireflies in Brooklyn walk?” (structural ambiguity)
“I didn’t even know they could drive” (structural ambiguity)
“I wonder what a bobcat orders at Starbucks” (antecedent reference ambiguity)
“Pass the mayo: Condiment could help improve fusion energy yields” (novel sentence)
“Local man fond of linguistic garden path sentences friends to hearing his boring puns” (garden path)
“Shout out to the top 5 skies in the world, pie in the, reach for the, excuse me while I kiss the, Lucy in the, and Blue.” (Island violation)
“Martyred porn squirrel” (Novel utterance)
“Stay fresh, cheese bags” (Novel utterance)
“In loving memory of Nicole Campbell, who never saw a dog and didn’t smile” (Structural ambiguity)
“To outtasightouttamind” (Verbing)

Helpful threads and posts

Benefits of using alt text
Hidden gems in lingcomm
I made a linguistics starter pack on Bluesky — if you’re thinking about joining, this will populate your feed with a few active linguists, which will in turn help you find others
The Chicago Manual of Style on punctuating with emojis
My tips on writing about science
How to respond to people using AI for a task (“That’s so neat! How are you verifying it?”)

Missed out on previous years? Here are the summary posts from 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021,2022, and 2023. If you’d like to get a much shorter quarterly highlights newsletter via email, with all sorts of interesting internet linguistics news and links, you can sign up for that at gretchenmcc.substack.com.

October, November, & December 2024: Lingthusiasm Makes the New York Times Word Nerd Top Five

May 8, 2025 leahvelleman

Lingthusiasm was featured in the New York Times’ list of 5 Podcasts for Word Nerds! And here’s print evidence that it happened.

The show is often as much about social habits as it is about language — one memorable episode had Gawne and McCulloch discuss “lopsided conversations,” those verbal interactions that can go off the rails if one person is either dominating or not contributing enough. It’s a fascinating listen that will change the way you see everyday communications.

The rest of the list had four other indie linguisticsy/languagey podcasts whose creators we also know and like: The Allusionist, Words Unravelled, The Vocal Fries, and A Way With Words. Check them all out!

New York Times, September 29, 2024, page AR 15, “Now Listen Up, You Word Nerds,” by Emma Dibdin

Besides that, I ran a little accidental A/B test on how to market your pop linguistics book.

And I answered linguistics questions from Ella Hubber, Tom Lum, and Caroline Roper on an episode of their very fun pop science podcast Let’s Learn Everything.

73: Linguist Gretchen McCulloch, Latin in Science, and Internet Linguistics

I also enrolled in my third American Sign Language class, ASL 103 with Deaf instructor Hariklia (Lia) Mavroudis, again through the Lethbridge Layton Mackay Rehabilitation Centre (LLMRC) in Montreal. Back in person again after 102 on Zoom, which was a huge relief. It’s also been fun this semester to start recognizing some people from previous classes and events!

Lingthusiasm

Lingthusiasm put out the usual six episodes — including a bonus episode about my last summer’s travel and visits from Emily M. Bender and Let’s Learn Everything.

We also added linguist, technical editor, and generally excellent human Leah Velleman to the Lingthusiasm team! Her first project was sprucing up the Lingthusiasm merch page (check it out, it’s much easier to navigate now!), and you may also notice her around here helping me with these newsletters, for which I’m very grateful.

Remembering Bill Labov

The great sociolinguist Bill Labov passed away. The internet remembered him as it does, with eulogies and also silly jokes about his best-known study:

Or, for a serious (but still entertaining) look at why he was so great, listen to Lingthusiasm’s episode about the bunny paper.

Favorite data

New weird utterances! Someone said these!

“Shout out to the top 5 skies in the world, pie in the, reach for the, excuse me while I kiss the, Lucy in the, and Blue.” (Island violation)
“Martyred porn squirrel” (Novel utterance)
“Stay fresh, cheese bags” (Novel utterance)
“In loving memory of Nicole Campbell, who never saw a dog and didn’t smile” (Structural ambiguity)
“To outtasightouttamind” (Verbing)

And several someones have already been saying these! To my great delight, they actually are or were common expressions.

“We will certainly get that piglet washed” (Dutch)
“Repussying” (Brazilian Portuguese)
“How is thy life-condition?” (Old English)
“Boop” (Modern English — now in the Cambridge Dictionary!)

A product label saying "Stay Fresh Cheese Bags." Above the text is a picture of sliced cheese.

Reading and listening

Here are some things I enjoyed this season:

Babel-17
A Hoard of Infinite Meanings
“A Terrible Irony”: How the Media Lost Trust
I put the glamor back into grammar, a “deadpan German linguistics bop”

Tweets and blog posts

Oh hey, my tweet is in this xkcd.com What If video

This quarter’s image is a pumpkin I carved for Halloween. Featuring two shapes, a round, blobby one and an angular, spikey one. If you had to assign the names kiki and bouba to these shapes, which one would be which?

Carved pumpkin with a rounded cloud shape on the left and a sharper star-like shape on the right with the text: One of the shapes on this pumpkin is called kiki and the other one is called boo-ba. Which is which?

August-September 2023: Etymology isn’t Destiny merch and an academic article about lingcomm

October 2, 2023January 17, 2024 gretchenassistant

I joined onto a fun project this month, Zach Weinersmith of the webcomic Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal is running a Kickstarter for his book, The Universe: Abridged Beyond the Point of Usefulness, and one of the bonus rewards is an audiobook of his other book, Shakespeare’s Sonnets: Abridged Beyond the Point of Usefulenss. I’ll be the one reading the highly abridged sonnets, which I’m looking forward to!

I wrote down assorted thoughts about I think about framing a plenary talk, which began as a bluesky thread and I’ve now archived as a blog post.

The main episodes of Lingthusiasm were How kids learn Q’anjob’al and other Mayan languages – Interview with Pedro Mateo Pedro, in which we talk about expanding research on how children learn languages to a broader range of sociocultural settings, and Look, it’s deixis, an episode about pointing!, in which we talk about how pointing varies across societies and species (domestic dogs can understand a point, but wolves cannot), and how linguistic pointing relates to the eternal confusion about which Tuesday is next Tuesday.

The bonus episodes feature two names you might recognize from the end credits of Lingthusiasm episodes: How we make Lingthusiasm transcripts – Interview with Sarah Dopierala, in which we talk about how Sarah’s background in linguistics helps her with the technical words and phonetic transcriptions in Lingthusiasm episodes, her own research into converbs, and the linguistic tendencies that she’s noticed from years of transcribing Lauren and Gretchen (guess which of us uses more quotative speech!) and Field Notes on linguistic fieldwork – Interview with Martha Tsutsui Billins, in which we talk about the process of doing linguistic fieldwork and interviewing dozens of linguists about it for her own podcast, Field Notes.

We also announced new Lingthusiasm merch! We love reading up on an interesting etymology, but the history of a word doesn’t have to define how it’s used now – and to celebrate that we have new merch with the motto ‘Etymology isn’t Destiny’. Our artist, Lucy Maddox has brought these words to life in a beautiful design in black, white, navy blue, Lingthusiasm green, and rainbow gradient. The etymology isn’t destiny design is available on lots of different colours and styles of shirts, hoodies, tank tops, t-shirts: classic fit, relaxed fit, curved fit. Plus mugs, notebooks, stickers, water bottles, zippered pouches, and more!

Finally, Lauren Gawne and I published an academic article about Communicating about linguistics using lingcomm-driven evidence: Lingthusiasm podcast as a case study. It’s in Language and Linguistic Compass, an open access linguistics journal, and you can read it in full here. Here’s the abstract:

Communicating linguistics to broader audiences (lingcomm) can be achieved most effectively by drawing on insights from across the fields of linguistics, science communication (scicomm), pedagogy and psychology. In this article we provide an overview of work that examines lingcomm as a specific practice. We also give an overview of the Lingthusiasm podcast, and discuss four major ways that we incorporate effective communications methodologies from a range of literature in the production of episodes. First, we discuss how we frame topics and take a particular stance towards linguistic attitudes, second, we discuss how we introduce linguistic terminology and manage audience cognitive load, third, we discuss the role of metaphor in effective communication of abstract concepts, and fourth, we discuss the affective tools of humour and awe in connecting audiences with linguistic concepts. We also discuss a 2022 survey of Lingthusiasm listeners, which highlights how the audience responds to our design choices. In providing this summary, we also advocate for lingcomm as a theoretically-driven area of linguistic expertise, and a particularly effective forum for the application of linguistics.

Selected tweets on Twitter:

Selected bluesky tweets:

This month’s image is from the new Etymology isn’t Destiny merch, which I think looks so good in the rainbow gradient on a dark background! I’ve enjoyed seeing some people with it already in real life and here it is on a tote bag:

"Etymology isn't destiny" in swoopy rainbow gradient text on a black tote bag hanging from a wooden hook.

https://allthingslinguistic.com/post/725034554312753152

June-July 2023: Lingstitute and Merriam-Webster

August 2, 2023December 29, 2023 gretchenassistant

In June and July, I headed to Lingstitute 2023, the LSA summer institute, at UMass Amherst. It was great to get to hang out with old friends and meet lots of new people

While I was in Massachusetts, I dropped by the headquarters of Merriam Webster to say hi to the dictionaries and lexicographers! (In that order.) Thanks especially to Peter Sokolowski for the guided tour and to Stacy Dickerman for the ride. Here are some photos I took on the tour, including many different eras of dictionary and the “linguistics” entry in the card catalogue:

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Gretchen McCulloch (@gretchen.mcculloch)

The main episodes of Lingthusiasm were The verbs had been being helped by auxiliaries and Frogs, pears, and more staples from linguistics example sentences. The bonus episodes were Linguistic jobs beyond academia and a very silly special episode we called LingthusiASMR, in which we read a classic set of linguistics examples known as the Harvard Sentences in our most soothing, meditative voices (people have reported that it may not exactly induce the ASMR effect but it does indeed work to fall asleep to, and we’re still fans of the pun).

Selected tweets:

Blog posts:

This month’s photo is of the Lingthusiasm postcards featuring the circle IPA design that we printed out to give out at Lingstitute. People seemed to like the challenge of figuring out what features all of the circles stood for, and I gave away lots but still have some left, so if you see me at a future conference do feel free to ask for one so you can have a fun thing to stick up by your desk or on your fridge!

May 2023: Spanish Because Internet, True Biz, and Word Magic

June 8, 2023December 29, 2023 gretchenassistant

This month, I announced that there’s going to be a Spanish-language edition of Because Internet coming at some point in 2024! Spanish has been the translation that people have requested from me the most and I’m delighted that Álex Herrero and the other folks at Pie de Página are making it happen.

The main episode of Lingthusiasm was Word Magic, in which we discuss the linguistics of the magical systems in several recent fantasy novels we like, including Babel by R.F. Kuang, Carry On by Rainbow Rowell, and the Scholomance series by Naomi Novik, as well as the ways that you can change the state of the real world with words using the linguistic concept of performatives, such as agreeing to contracts, placing bets, and naming. The bonus episode was about reviewing the results of our 2022 listener survey, including answers to questions on whether knowing about the kiki/bouba effect as a meme influences your results on the kiki/bouba test, synesthesia, and whether people pluralize “emoji” as “emoji” or “emojis”.

People often ask Lingthusiasm to recommend interesting books about linguistics that don’t assume prior knowledge of linguistics, so we’ve come up with a list of 12 books that we personally recommend, including both nonfiction and fiction books with linguistically interesting elements! Get this list of our top 12 linguistics books by signing up for Lingthusiasm’s free email list (which will otherwise send you an email once a month when there’s a new episode — this is something we’re doing to help continue to reach people amid the rising fragmentation of the social media ecosystem).

The most recent of those books, which I read this month, was True Biz by Sara Novic and made a thread with some linguistically interesting snippets from it. Definitely recommend!

Finally reading @NovicSara's True Biz and greatly enjoying how it innovates with form to show ASL within the constraints of a print page mostly in English.
You. Name, one set of pointer and middle fingers tapped twice on top of the other set. What, almost like the gesture, hands up and out like a shrug. Eyebrows again, down this time.
You + name + what—eyebrows.
(line drawing of person doing said signs on the page of a book)
Here the alphabet did come in handy, and Charlie was grateful that she could at least spell her own name.
Me name C-h-a-x-l-i-e, she said.
The teacher shook his head, pointed to his own hand. C. He pointed to Charlie. C. H. A. R.
Dammit.
R, she copied.
He gave her a thumbs up.
Again, he said.
Everyone waited, watching her.
Me name C-h-a-r-l-i-e
The teacher nodded and continued around the circle. Once everyone had a turn, he returned to the board and wrote, Deaf, Hearing, Son, Daughter, Brother, Sister, then pointed to each and signed its equivalent.
(line drawings of signs)
Her fellow students introduced themselves. Most of them were parents or relatives of younger River Valley kids.
Me hearing. My son deaf.

Selected Tweets: